Latest Lessons

While learning to play George Benson’s licks can be a great way to dig into his sound and bring some of his lines into your solos, it can be much more beneficial to dissect his licks to see what concepts he was using to build these great-sound lines.

While there are many different voicings you can use to comp or solo over this common progression, with many offering important chord colors that should be explored in your practice routine, sometimes the easiest way to navigate this progression is to stick to one voicing and use it for multiple chords in a minor ii V i.

In part 1, we learned how to count and play basic rhythms in 4/4 time and subdivide beats into eighth notes by counting "one and, two and, three and, four and, one and, two and, three and, four and," etc.

Every musician should have a clear understanding of the fundamentals of rhythm. Even if you consider yourself an “ear player,” knowing how to count and play different rhythms while keeping a steady beat is a valuable skill that will help you in a variety of real-life musical situations. By learning the arithmetic of rhythm on paper, you’ll be able to accurately read and learn music from transcriptions, and you will no longer have to rely entirely on the recording for the timing and phrasing of the notes.

One of my favorite things about heavy metal music is the brutal rhythm guitar parts that have been devised by the genre's greatest bands, such as Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer and mothers. In this month's column, I'd like to show you some of the effective techniques for developing cool-sounding and very metal rhythm guitar parts.

In today’s lesson, we’ll be looking at how you can use two common arpeggios, 7th and m7th shapes, in combination to outline the 7#9 sound in your jazz guitar lines and solos, allowing you to dig into this fun and interesting chord without worrying about learning any new scales or modes before you can nail this chord in your solos.

"Earth Departure" is one of the most adventurous tunes on the new Animals As Leaders album, Weightless. The song features some very intense, complex figures that require extremely tight band interplay.

Over my past two columns, I've been investigating different approaches to improvisation on the guitar, specifically addressing ways to combine chordal and single-note-line ideas effectively to create rhythm parts that are both harmonically and rhythmically interesting and inspired.

The most important part of this process is to find a way to do this as instantly and spontaneously as possible, and this is true for anything this is truly improvisational.